Failing to boot Linux distros w/ P67 chipset/SB Core I7
 

Hello Everybody,

Please go easy as I'm a bit of a beginner. I have built a gaming PC that can boot into Windows 7, it's an MSI motherboard with a P67 chipset and I have the Intel I7 processor.

It fails to boot into several distro of Linux, (in normal or failsafe mode), will not boot Ubuntu 11.10, older versions of Ubuntu, Parted Magic.

I find it hard to believe that there could be a fault with my fresh out of the box processor - I also have Nvidia Geforce GTX580, I'm wondering is it possible that none of my distros are able to run on this device.

Ran Memtest86 and haven't found any issues.

PartedMagic gives me this error message

"The pmagic-6.6sqfs file could not be found"

Any help would be greatly appreciated

You say they won't boot, but what do they do? Are you trying to run live CDs or full installations? What have you/haven't you been able to do so far?

Are you seeing anything on the screen? Does your motherboard have onboard VGA?

With some fiddling around, I solved a similar problem.
 

I tried Mint 13 MATE on a P67/i5 Ivy/GTX 560 SE rig. First try was a no-go - nothing. I tried openSUSE and it worked, but I wanted to use Mint so tried again. I found that if I tapped a key after the BIOS post I could get the choice to boot in compatibility mode up. I'd get to install then. After the install I'd hit the enter key on the re-boot before the cursor came up. Now I'd get to try booting in recovery mode. I'd choose to restore broken packages, then do a normal boot. Then the key to everything finally working (these steps I'm describing were my fourth and final - and mostly successful - try at installing Mint 13 on this thing) was to install the nVidia driver that worked. (My third attempt at an install I'd gotten a driver that didn't work.) I did so by using these commands which I got from the Unixmen site:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings
After that was installed, I installed all of the updates from the Update Manager, then re-booted with my fingers crossed. It took a while, but I saw the mouse cursor on the screen and pretty soon the whole thing came up - with it recognizing the monitor (Viewsonic VT2405LED) and the settings for refresh and resolution already correctly set. Yea! Two previous tries gave me a dead-end with it saying the X Window system was not being configured properly. The key seems to be getting the right nVidia driver in there to do its job. My only problem with that particular PC after all that was trying to get sound via HDMI. After hours of trying everything I could find on sites like this one I gave up and went with using the motherboard's (ASRock P67 EXTREME4 GEN3) digital audio output. Looks like a lot of people are fighting to get their nVidia cards' HDMI audio to work without any luck, not just me.